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Science and the Demise of Philosophy

robertpriddy.com

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Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#11

Post by Herring »

ajdecon wrote: post #9
prodigal_erik wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think "Einstein's famous breakthrough was one of reason advancing well beyond the facts" bears thinking on. It took years before we could try to falsify relativity empirically, so in the meantime how did we avoid filtering him out as just another crackpot? But it's hard not to dismiss "even investigative and creative reason have largely been blinkered so as to concentrate it overwhelmingly upon the observable wo…

Several things about Einstein's work made it plausible and not obviously the work of a crackpot, despite its initial non-falsifiability: * It was consistent with most observations and experiments done thus far. * It offered an explanation for known issues which were being grappled with at the time, i.e. the observation of speed of light in moving reference frames. * It built on existing work and showed Einstein's fam…

There's also that michelson-morley came out around the same time. Whether or not Einstein heard of it, there's very few ways of combining e&m & newtonian physics in light of that experiment. (Pun intended)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#S... Apparently the fizeau experiment did influence his thinking

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#12

Post by teeja »

The fact that this chapter doesn't bother to mention Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc. tells me this is axe-grinding.

"The resulting weak role of 'handmaidens' who applaud progress as scientific" were Feyerabend's favorite targets.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#13

Post by christopherolah »

modeless wrote: post #7
antaeos wrote: post #3

I call shenanigans. Wholly oriented towards investigating and changing the material world, science rejects anything related to practical self-discovery or spiritual truth. In this lies the crisis of the widespread modern intellectualism that swears itself to science; it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of…

"it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life" This is only true if you believe the brain will remain forever inscrutable. If we come to a complete understanding of how the brain works, we will be able to answer all these questions (at least as far as they relate to humans) far more completely than any amou…

It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia?

Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only problem is, I can actually see the color. How can a series of chemical reactions cause me to feel?

The irony of this is, of course, that pzombies (philosophical zombies: beings that don't feel anything but act exactly as though they do) would come to the same conclusion.

Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with.

I, for my part, was led to the conclusion that the scientific-materialist perspective was wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. It seems logical as science is essentially the art of useful fiction: we make up the simplest story that predicts the right answers and use it until it breaks (and sometimes beyond that and just avoid the points we know it breaks at).

I'm very interested in hearing others' views.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#14

Post by foldr »

Herring wrote: post #8
foldr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)

Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology ( purpose, meaning, morals, values etc ) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science. I think his problem is that we can…

Well, this is the problem. There are really not any good reasons for believing most of what you said there, but people seem to think that no arguments for these positions are necessary: it's enough to state them forcefully and claim that anyone who disagrees is an idiot.

>It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means;

I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems like a "basic fact"), but I'm not sure that it would do anything useful in this context. The whole question at issue is what constitutes an "effective" means of studying various topics of interest. For example, what are the effective means of studying moral facts? You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?

Incidentally, your proposed definition of science is clearly at odds with most standard conceptions. For example, it might (hypothetically) turn out that pure intuition is the most effective way of studying reality -- we might turn out to have incredibly good intuitions about how the world works. According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific. The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective, although no-one has ever quite pinned down the precise nature of this additional constraint.

>We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul.

Maybe you should refer to some specific results in psychology, neuroscience or phsyics that back this statement up. For example, an explanation of how facts about purpose and morality could reduce to facts about the primitives of physics. There are a few explanations on the market, but you might at least be specific about which one you are buying into. Here's an exercise. Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts:

(1) It is wrong to kill someone for no reason.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#15

Post by modeless »

christopherolah wrote: post #13
modeless wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life" This is only true if you believe the brain will remain forever inscrutable. If we come to a complete understanding of how the brain works, we will be able to answer all these questions (at least as far as they relate to humans) far more completely than any amou…

It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia? Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only…

I feel that the problem you describe is exacerbated (as so many philosophical "problems" are) by the imprecision of the language used in framing the problem. Rather than bicker over word definitions, I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics.

Of course I can't prove that we will be able to create such computers. If we can't then that would be evidence for a non-physical basis of consciousness. However, I feel that right now the burden of proof is on the people who claim that consciousness doesn't obey the laws of physics, as we haven't yet found any other process which doesn't.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#16

Post by foldr »

modeless wrote: post #15
christopherolah wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia? Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only…

I feel that the problem you describe is exacerbated (as so many philosophical "problems" are) by the imprecision of the language used in framing the problem. Rather than bicker over word definitions, I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics. Of course I can't prove that we will be able to…

[I am not the OP]

> I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics.

I find this stance baffling. How would a complete simulation of the brain tell us how a chemical reaction could cause a feeling? That seems quite a lot to hope for!

There is also a question-begging element here. What you consider a "complete" simulation of the brain will differ depending on whether or not you are a materialist in the first place. (I.e., will the simulation include feelings as part of its model? If it doesn't, aren't you begging the question in favor of physicalism?)

>as we haven't yet found any other process which doesn't [obey the laws of physics].

Isn't this basically true by definition? If we find something that doesn't obey the laws of current physics, we just modify the laws. We certainly found processes which didn't obey the currently accepted laws of physics at a number of points in the history of physics.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#17

Post by modeless »

foldr wrote: post #16
modeless wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the problem you describe is exacerbated (as so many philosophical "problems" are) by the imprecision of the language used in framing the problem. Rather than bicker over word definitions, I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics. Of course I can't prove that we will be able to…

[I am not the OP] > I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics. I find this stance baffling. How would a complete simulation of the brain tell us how a chemical reaction could cause a feeling? That seems quite a lot to hope for! There is also a question-begging element here. What you conside…

Like I said, I believe the "problem" itself is ill-defined. Philosophy in general has a tendency to devolve into arguments over word definitions and I simply don't think that's productive. A simulation of the brain will give us the data we need to frame the problem precisely enough to actually answer it.

> If we find something that doesn't obey the laws of current physics, we just modify the laws.

If consciousness is truly outside the domain of science then logically there would be no law we could create to account for its effects. But I'll go a step further and say that I believe consciousness obeys the laws of physics as we currently understand them. Again I don't have a proof of this, but neither do the people who say it doesn't.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#18

Post by nazgulnarsil »

christopherolah wrote: post #13
modeless wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life" This is only true if you believe the brain will remain forever inscrutable. If we come to a complete understanding of how the brain works, we will be able to answer all these questions (at least as far as they relate to humans) far more completely than any amou…

It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia? Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only…

qualia has a physical description: simply describe a brain the moment that it is receiving sense data of light in the red spectrum.

that this is currently beyond us technologically doesn't mean that it is in any way a philosophical conundrum.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#19

Post by Herring »

foldr wrote: post #14
Herring wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology ( purpose, meaning, morals, values etc ) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science. I think his problem is that we can…

Well, this is the problem. There are really not any good reasons for believing most of what you said there, but people seem to think that no arguments for these positions are necessary: it's enough to state them forcefully and claim that anyone who disagrees is an idiot. >It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems…

> The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective

Well no, we just need methods leading to verifiable (ie predictive) results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

Any methods will do, it's the body of knowledge that is important. I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason), but we'd use it so long as it works.

>

> Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts [...] You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?

It's human behavior & human preferences, what else could it be? We can watch which parts of the brain light up when doing morality (eg google brain fairness). Even monkeys have a sense of fairness (google). If birds could talk they'd tell you it's a "moral fact" that birds should protect their young. Morality is clearly hardwired through evolution[1].

To see how frustrating this is, imagine you're arguing with people who are sure CPUs work because of "machine spirits." You don't have to be a chip designer to point out obvious circuitry, energy requirements, changes in function due to differing structures/damage, etc but they'll just believe whatever they want without evidence.

[1] And biology reduces to physics. Read selfish gene etc if you want to know how morality evolved, but it's clear it did happen.

Re: Science and the Demise of Philosophy

#20

Post by billswift »

joe_the_user wrote: post #2

Wow, This certainly gives a powerful overview of the quandary of human beings in our modern world. Bit heavy for hacker news but I welcome it. The problem is, humanity won't go back to the world whose loss Priddy describes. So how do we solve these problems going forward?

Since the "problems" in that chapter don't actually exist, we ignore them, how else?
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